SFA ScholarWorks

Permissions Assistance for the SFA ScholarWorks Community

We welcome all faculty, students and other members of the Stephen F. Austin State University community to submit their scholarly research and creative works to ScholarWorks. If your research or work has already been published in a journal or other publication, you may need to secure copyright permissions before they can be accepted for submission. The following are some strategies for securing permissions.

Obtaining Permission

Publishers are often willing to grant an author permission to upload previously submitted works to an institutional repository. To determine the specific policy of your publisher you may check the following websites:

When deposit of the full text is not possible due to copyright restrictions, a citation, abstract and descriptive information, including a link to an alternative location such as the version hosted by the publisher, may be added. It may also be possible to work with your publisher to re-gain these rights. While we are happy to guide you in the process of contacting the publisher, we have found that it is far more effective when authors contact their publishers directly.

Here are two letter templates:

Retaining Rights

Many publishers will allow you to retain some of your rights upon submission of new works. In particular, most major publishers will allow authors to retain the right to provide open access to their published works after a brief (usually six months to a year) embargo period. For more details on how to retain your rights as an author, see this guide (http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/copyright-ownership/publication-agreements) to publication agreements from the Columbia University Copyright Advisement Office.

Sharing Your Rights, Creative Commons Licenses

As the creator or owner of a copyrighted work, you may define which rights you are willing to share and under what conditions you will share them through a Creative Commons License. Three of the most commonly used include:


  • Attribution
    CC BY
    This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
    View License Deed | View Legal Code


  • Attribution-NonCommercial
    CC BY-NC
    This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
    View License Deed | View Legal Code


  • Attribution-NoDerivs
    CC BY-ND
    This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
    View License Deed | View Legal Code

    • http://creativecommons.org/ Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Your Rights and SFA ScholarWorks

Once you have secured the proper permissions, you are welcome to submit your work to SFA ScholarWorks. When submitting work, please be sure to add the permission statement in the document. All other works submitted to ScholarWorks are considered to have a Creative Commons CC BY license unless otherwise indicated.